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DISPATCH SERIES

Killers Among Us: ‘Lost in the world’

Wife, four kids were left empty after dad was killed during holdup in ’96

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoJonathan Quilter | DISPATCHMaria Paulino DaSilva holds a photo of her late husband, Dib “Miguel” Yasin, who was killed by robbers who held both at gunpoint in the store they had bought a few weeks earlier. Behind her are their children, from left, Habib, Faiza, Marcia and Adib Paulino.

Killers Among Us

Killers Among Us: This occasional series examines unsolved killings in Central Ohio. Tips to Crime Stoppers could result in a reward.

Case in brief

Central Ohio Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest
and conviction in this case. Tips can be submitted anonymously online at Central Ohio Crime
Stoppers, www.stopcrime.org, or by calling Crime Stoppers at 614-461-8477 or toll-free at
1-877-645-8477. Information, without the promise of anonymity, also can be directed to the Columbus
Police Division’s unsolved-case review team at 614-645-4036.

Keys to the case

A man standing across the street saw the boys run east across N. 4th Street. Detectives
think they lived in the neighborhood and that they ran to someone they knew, seeking safe harbor
after the shooting. Both the witness and Miguel’s wife describe the boys as black teenagers, one
being perhaps as young as 13 or 14 years old. They had scarves across parts of their faces, and one
was wearing a blue-and-white coat, perhaps a Starter jacket.

Columbus homicide detective Dana Farbacher has a suspect who he thinks was the shooter; a
teenager at the time who later was convicted of drugs, assault and weapons charges in Tennessee. He
is out of prison now but still lives in that state. Farbacher said finding the second person — the
one who did not fire his gun — is key.

Timeline

Dec. 19, 1995

Miguel and his wife buy the D&J Carryout, after having spent many years as part owners
of the Little Giant grocery on E. Whittier Street.

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Maria Paulino DaSilva puts her trembling hands on her forehead and pats a mark in the center
that only she can see.

She can still feel the cold metal of the gun barrel that once was pressed there. She waves her
fingers in the air, demonstrating the puff of smoke. The gunpowder — she still smells it.

She describes the crack of the gun. She still can hear it. But it didn’t come from the gun that
was pressed against her skull.

The kid who held his gun on her, the one who cursed her and called her vile names, never fired.
But his friend did.

Maria closes her eyes, and the tears squeeze out. Over and over in her head plays the image of
her husband falling back into racks filled with Skittles and Snickers, crumpling to the floor of
their Weinland Park convenience store. The shot had pierced his heart.

She ran screaming from the store and into N. 4th Street that cold, snowy January night almost 16
years ago. “Someone killed my husband!” she yelled. “Please help! Someone killed my husband!”

She and her four children — 12, 13, 14 and 18 back then — say the path of that single bullet
derailed their lives.

Weeping now as she recounts events of that night, she struggles to find the English words. Her
native language comes:
Perdido no mundo.

Her older son translates his mother’s Portuguese. “Lost in the world,” Adib Paulino says. “She
is lost in the world.”

Columbus police detective Dana Farbacher was working second-shift homicide on Jan. 9, 1996, a
Tuesday, when he got the call a few minutes after 9 p.m. Dib “Miguel” Yasin, a 44-year-old,
Jerusalem-born Palestinian, had been gunned down behind the cash register of his store just an hour
before closing time.

As soon as the detective walked into the D&J Carryout, at N. 4th Street and

E. 8th Avenue, he figured it for a robbery gone bad.

Maria told him what she could: Two boys, maybe as young as 14 or 15 years old, had walked in,
white scarves covering most of their faces and shadows from their hoods obscuring the rest.

They demanded cigars. Miguel handed them a box of Swisher Sweet blunts.

The shot rang out.

The two boys ran. They took no cash and didn’t grab a single item from the shelves. They stole
only the most precious thing the family had: a devoted father, a loving husband, a good provider, a
friend.

“This guy, he wasn’t doing anything,” Farbacher said. “He was trying to make a living and help
the neighborhood out, and somebody came out and killed him.”

He thinks the boys were from the neighborhood. He thinks they knew that Miguel, who had
purchased the store only three weeks before, tucked extra cash into cigar boxes under the counter.
They didn’t really want cigars; they were after those boxes.

Maybe the real cigars angered the kid so much that he shot Miguel dead, Farbacher theorizes.
Maybe he was so young, so new at intimidation, that he panicked. Maybe the whole thing had been a
dare, a gang initiation or just a way a couple of young thugs thought they could earn some
respect.

That part of town was ripe for trouble back then. Police had swept nearly four dozen people from
the streets in 1995, using a federal indictment with more than 200 charges that took away the
leaders and most-important associates of the notorious gang known as the Short North Posse.

For years, its members had run drugs on about 42 blocks of the neighborhood, killing outsiders
who got in their way. The hobbling of the gang was a relief to most, but the absence of leadership
on the streets created a vacuum for young wannabes who had nobody to tell them what to do, or what
not to do.

“Before, somebody would have told them, ‘You don’t go rob the corner market,’ ” Farbacher said.
“That just brings the police into the neighborhood, and the gangsters don’t want that.”

Farbacher has very little to go on. A man standing across the street heard the shot and Maria’s
screams. He told police he saw two slightly built black youths run from the store and head east
across 4th Street. He said one was wearing a blue-and-white coat, perhaps a Starter jacket.

But an immediate canvass of the area turned up nothing. The detective feels strongly that the
boys ran to someone they knew close by and told them what they had done. Farbacher is confident he
knows who the shooter was — a teen who, after a tip years later, Maria identified from a photo
array as someone who had been in the store earlier that day.

He eventually served time for felonious assault and drug and weapons crimes. He is out of prison
now and living in Tennessee.

Finding the second teen is key, Farbacher said. “He’s got to know, ‘I didn’t pull the trigger
and I’m not quite as culpable.’ I need somebody to step up and do the right thing.”

Adib was 13 that night. He was watching basketball on television when a friend knocked on the
door of the family’s Ivyhurst Drive home on the East Side. She didn’t tell the Paulino children why
she’d come, but she wouldn’t allow them to watch any news.

The night wore on, and their parents didn’t come home from work. Marcia, 14, called the market,
and no one answered. She called again. And again. Panic crept in.

Eventually, their mother walked through the front door. “She didn’t have to say nothing,” said
Adib, now 29. “Right there, when that happened, it changed everything. It was the night that would
never go away.”

Faiza, the oldest child, was a high-school senior headed for college. She never went. Marcia
married young. Adib and his then 12-year-old brother, Habib, were at an age when a boy needs his
father most.

“There was nobody to guide us,” Adib said. Habib: “We had no direction.”

Their mother went to work in a store owned by her brothers-in-law to support her family. She
felt broken, the days and months ahead just a blur.

The children lost hope.

Gone was the man who had barbecued chicken wings for them in the fireplace and played basketball
with them in the driveway for hours on end. Gone was the man who once waited until his wife — the
disciplinarian of the house — had left to see her relatives and, before she was even on the
airplane, surprised the kids with a new Nintendo and played video games with them all night
long.

But they forged their way. Adib and his mother own a house-cleaning business, and Habib works as
a construction subcontractor. Faiza is about to move to her mother’s native Brazil. Marcia works in
the domestic-violence section of the Columbus city attorney’s office. They have friends, families
of their own, beautiful children.

They are all healthy and happy. Yet they know they are different from what they might have
been.

“That’s the hardest part about losing somebody,” Adib said. “Once they are gone, there’s no
going back.”

Central Ohio Crime Stoppers is offering up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest and
conviction in this case. Tips can be submitted anonymously online at Central Ohio Crime Stoppers,
www.stopcrime.org, or by calling Crime Stoppers at
614-461-8477 or toll-free at 1-877-645-8477. Information, without the promise of anonymity, also
can be directed to the Columbus Police Division’s unsolved-case review team at 614-645-4036.

This occasional series examines unsolved killings in central Ohio. Tips to Crime Stoppers could
result in a reward. Submit them anonymously at http://stopcrime.org or 877-645-8477.